


A Formal Dance in the Bowling Alley

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here are some things that James Tiberius Kirk, Captain, does not understand about the <i>Enterprise</i> and her crew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Formal Dance in the Bowling Alley

Here are some things that James Tiberius Kirk, Captain, does not understand about the USS Enterprise and her crew:

*

_Where all the alcohol comes from._

"No," Scotty is saying, "no, no. You don't just inhale it, man! You..." – a long, sumptuous pause – "savour it. Roll it around your mouth a little. There y'are, there's a good boy."

Chekhov looks unconvinced, and picks up his glass of whisky to stare pointedly through the liquid at the bottom of it. "It is not – how do you say it? – personal, Mr. Scott. I do not mean to insult your country. But this, it lacks... purity."

"Purity." Scotty is unimpressed. "That's finest single malt, boy, carried out here with me at enormous expense. Do you even know how much space there is in your average crewmember's personal allowance for large, fragile bottles? What am I saying, of course you do."

"Vodka!" Chekhov says excitedly. "That, that is a man's drink!"

Scotty sighs. "Vodka, lad, is what retiring engineering types such as myself use to clean windows with. We're going to have to take your education well in hand, yes we are."

After a pause Chekhov asks, "Have they found the beagle yet?"

Scotty looks deeply pained. "Why do you think we're drinking?"

"I see. Are you sure you wouldn't like some vodka?"

Out in the corridor, Kirk laughs a little and moves on.

*

_What Spock does for fun. _

The little voice in his head that says "Uhura" is judiciously silenced. One evening not long after the ship has broken spacedock, Kirk lets his feet wander ever-so-casually down a couple of decks and deposit him neatly in front of Spock's quarters. "Enter," Spock calls, and Kirk enters with the air of a man broaching an inner sanctum. He doesn't know what he expected to see – bare walls, spartan space barely removed from the _Enterprise_ blueprints, perhaps – but it wasn't like this. Spock's quarters are kept simply and neatly, but there is art and colour: muted Vulcan abstracts with occasional bright splashes; a beautiful, balanced sword mounted with care on one wall; small, unobtrusive holo images of Uhura and another human woman. Spock's mother, Kirk realises. He met her once, at the Academy, accompanying Sarek – as Vulcan ambassador to Earth, he often had occasion to address the Academy cadets, and Kirk's abiding memory of the man is that he was stiff, upright, but not without quiet, wry humour, a trait he is beginning to realise Spock shares.

"Can I help you, Captain?" Spock asks after a while, and Kirk realises he's dithering.

"I'm about to have dinner," he says, awkwardly. "I wondered... if you might like to join me." After a pause, he adds, "You absolutely don't have to eat what I eat."

Spock gives him a long look. "In that case, it would be my pleasure."

Kirk laughs despite himself. Spock turns out the lights with a word to the ship's computer, and they head down to the mess hall, where Kirk gets himself steak with eggs and pineapple and Spock delicately sips a bowl of plomeek soup. After a while, when they've discussed the forthcoming diplomatic mission and the integrity of the anterior nacelle and just when Admiral Archer is going to stop sending angry messages marked for the attention of engineering, Kirk says, "Spock..." – and loses his nerve.

"What is it, Jim?" Spock says, and he sounds almost kind.

"I... get the feeling the universe is going too fast for us." He's dithering again, waving his hands about as though they'll make him more articulate. "You – the other you, I mean. He said… he said things. About us."

"He spoke of our friendship in terms that indicated it would define my life, and perhaps yours." Spock's voice is level.

"Yeah." More hand flapping. "Yeah, that."

"But you are perturbed?"

"Spock, I just met you!" Kirk gets out, finally. "I just met you, what, a month, two months ago? And I know we've been through a lot since then, and people say adversity breeds familiarity and all of that..."

"Do people say that? I am unfamiliar with people saying that."

"Yes, well – Spock! You're teasing me!" Kirk stops waving his hands about and peers at Spock's bright eyes and perfect lack of expression.

"Perhaps." There it is, Kirk thinks obscurely; there's Spock's sense of humour, right there. Maybe he winds humans up for fun. "In all seriousness, Captain, I understand your concerns."

"Do you really," Kirk grouches.

"This is only the beginning of our mission, Captain." Spock almost smiles. "Today I have dined with you. Tomorrow, you shall, perhaps, dine with me. The day after that remains an unknown variable."

"Does that mean, _wait and see?_" Kirk asks.

Spock says nothing, cracks an expression that may involve the corners of his mouth turning upwards, and sips his soup.

*

_What crawled up McCoy's ass and died (or, what he would do without McCoy)._

"You need a physical and all-over check-up," McCoy insists, grabbing him by the arm. "Come with me."

"Bones!" Kirk insists, trying to hurry down towards the turbolift and away from him. "We're reaching planetary orbit in three hours! I've got other things to do right now!"

"No, you haven't. I had your schedule cleared. Come on."

"Bones, this is insubordination..." Kirk half-yells, as he's half-led, half-dragged to sickbay.

"Not at all," says McCoy briskly, clearing away equipment so he has a space to work. "Just sit on the bed, there, that's right. Jim, you were smuggled into space the last time, in case you've forgotten? And this ship has hundreds of people all living in a very confined space, so in the absence of routine screening I'd like to make sure you're not harbouring anything in the way of, you know, killer pathogens."

"You're being paranoid," Kirk says mutinously, submitting to a hypospray.

"Not at all, you're just a terrible patient. Even Scotty wasn't as bad as you, and there's a man who yells when things go wrong."

"He's... a little tense right now," Kirk says, carefully. "Really, Bones, is this necessary?"

"Do you want me to sign you off duty? I can, you know. On this point I outrank you."

"Bones, stop it," Kirk says, but stops struggling. In the sudden silence that descends, broken only by the odd whistle from the computers, a thought occurs to him. "How are you liking your new job?"

"My new job?"

"You weren't Chief Medical Officer before." Funny, Kirk thinks; he'd entirely forgotten he wasn't the only person struggling under the weight of unexpected promotion.

"No," McCoy says thoughtfully. "But before I was a cadet, I was a country doctor. My practice has just expanded a mite. And I'm reading my xenobiology textbooks every chance I can get, I assure you."

"That's... okay." It really is; he somehow didn't doubt that Bones would fall into this whole new status quo and manage as though he'd been doing it all his life. "But. I don't know, Bones. How are we doing?"

"How are we doing? You mean" – he waves an expansive hand that seems to indicate the entirety of the _Enterprise_ – "how are we all doing?"

"Maybe, how am _I_ doing," Kirk says, glumly. "I'm not exactly planning to hand out feedback forms, but."

McCoy grins. "You're passable, Jim Kirk. Would smuggle into space again."

Kirk thinks he ought to be indignant at that. But he grins back anyway.

*

_At any given moment, what the hell is going on._

In quiet geostationary orbit, Kirk's ready to go off-shift when he has the sudden, unsettling sense of a high-intensity vibration passing through the bridge. Spock, usually a bastion of self-control, has instinctively put his hands over his ears. "What's going on, Mr. Chekhov?" Kirk says as calmly as he can muster.

"I don't know, sir!" Chekhov says, desperately. "My readings don't make any sense!"

The pitch is rising, getting beyond the range of human hearing, although not, Kirk notes when looking at the slump in Spock's shoulders, Vulcan. It lasts an excruciating few seconds more before something small and bright shimmers in mid-air a few feet in front of Kirk's chair, and in a burst of blessed silence, resolves itself into a brown-and-white dog.

There is a shocked pause. The dog, apparently none the worse for its six feet drop to the ground, nuzzles appreciatively at Kirk's ankles. Kirk, brought to himself, slaps his comm. "Bridge to Engineering."

_"Scott here."_

"Mr. Scott" – Kirk pauses, wondering how to phrase it, and is saved by a small bark.

_"Porthos!"_ Scotty yells, and the channel goes abruptly dead. In far too short a time, the turbolift opens and the dog bounds over to Scotty, sitting on his feet.

"Scotty," says Kirk helplessly, "should I even ask?"

"Admiral Archer's dog, sir," Scotty says smartly. "Name of Porthos. Porthos the second, actually. Come on, you wee monster. He won't be a lick of trouble, sir. Does what he's told."

"The unfortunate creature may be alone on this ship in his possession of that characteristic," says Spock, quite recovered.

"Carry on, Mr. Scott," says Kirk, and smiles.

*

_How Uhura does it._

She's perfectly still on the bridge, but it's the kind of measured stillness that means someone ought to be practicing their terrified face round about now. The departments of science and linguistics are well aware of this, Kirk notes; the ship's internal communications pass through his console, and the messages for Uhura from the lower decks seem slightly strained. She herself is perfectly calm; her fingers are flying over her workstation with studied precision.

The figure on the viewscreen is... craggy. Very craggy, and Kirk is fairly sure that what pass for identifying features in this species are variants on quartz crystals and flat stripes of sedimentary layering. The transmitted message bouncing around the bridge sounds like the rumbling of enormous forces, cracks happening deep underground.

Suddenly, there is a brief spike in the transmission, and a sound like a frying pan hitting the bottom of a well.

"Ah," says Uhura.

"What was that?" Kirk asks, more sharply than he'd meant to.

"A verb." Off his look, she grins. "Captain, this is a race of people who are in some sense related to rocks. Their language is very... static."

"Static," Kirk repeats, and the frying pan sound happens again, and again. Uhura looks determined, and hits some more buttons. The universal translator, which until now has been saying things like _"Me – you/she/it – rock – static – fizzle – indefinite personal pronoun – rock"_, suddenly clicks into place and says smoothly, _"Greetings, Captain Kirk. It is an honour to make your acquaintance. We are the na'Mhridreah."_

Kirk can even hear the apostrophe. Looking straight at the screen, he says, "Greetings. Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?"

Behind his back, he gives her a tiny thumbs-up, because it's all he can do.

*

_Why the whole circus stays on the road, anyway._

He doesn't want to bring it up, but he'd be a bad captain if he didn't, and the one thing Kirk does not want to be is a bad ship's captain. "Mr. Scott," he says, at a suitable break in the conversation. "Scotty."

"What is it, Captain?" Scotty asks, lazily, leaning back in his chair. Kirk notes that he seems relaxed, and is pleased. This isn't a formal dinner by any stretch of the imagination, but the presence of the captain and first officer has a dampening effect even on ordinary mess hall dining.

"Now that we're definitely communicating with the na... - with the..."

"na'Mhridreah," Spock murmurs unobtrusively.

"Yes, now we're making diplomatic progress, and your little... friend has reappeared" – Porthos barks from under the table, pleased with the attention – "you know, you don't, you don't have to stay. You had a promising career on Earth before Delta Vega, I hear. I just – I don't want you to feel like you have to stay out here out of some misplaced sense of duty, or something."

Sulu, on Kirk's other side, looks faintly horrified at this; Kirk resolves not to ask what Scotty has been teaching him in the way of creative liquid recreation. Scotty himself looks thoughtful, and Kirk remembers the depth of the snow on Delta Vega, the perpetual frigidity. "Nah," Scotty says eventually. "I think I'm sticking around. Well, if I left I'd have to get Mr. Spock to write me a character reference, and you know what's he like."

"Quite," Spock says. "Mr. Scott lacks a sound grasp of basic mathematical principles. Often, he purports to extract performance figures of more than one hundred percent from the warp cores. I would also be forced to note his tendency to anthropomorphise the ship. Such devotion is not... logical."

Their expressions are identically even. Kirk grins, and lets it go. "As long as you're sure?"

"Oh, aye." Scotty tosses a scrap to the dog, who snaps it down without ceremony. "I'm staying right here, Captain. We all are."

"Oh. Good," Kirk says, and leans back in his chair.

*

But, he thinks, given time and space, he'll figure it all out.


End file.
